A beautiful, honest, and incredibly sympathetic reflection on the relationship between anxiety, control, and circumstance appeared in The NY Times last week, as part of their (and now our!) ongoing series about Anxiety, the appropriately titled “The Snake in the Garden”. It’s hard to write a hopeful piece about what are essentially self-defeating internal processes, but that’s exactly what Pico Iyer has pulled off here. The final paragraph is one for the ages in fact, and he even uses Garden of Eden imagery to frame his dilemma (which, one might add, is highly reminiscent of the first chapter of Dorothy…
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Another Week Ends: Wiman’s Abyss, Opinionless Boyfriends, Compassionology, Lehrergate, Antinomianism, Revolution, Taylor Swift, and Wreck-It Ralph
1. Every once and a while something comes across your screen that is so beautiful and honest and profound and enlivening that you want to force others to watch it. If commands of this kind worked, that’s what I’d do here. I’m referring to the interview that Bill Moyers conducted with poet (and Poetry Magazine editor) Christian Wiman this past February. Much like the essay of Wiman’s we featured last week, this is gut level stuff; he touches on pretty much everything that’s important. Or I should day, nothing that he touches on isn’t important: love, marriage, cancer, beauty, poetry,…
Food Is Everything? Serving Salvation on a Silver Platter
An incredible column appeared in The NY Times recently, “A Matter of Taste?”, in which William Deresiewicz observed the religious characteristics inherent in the ascendency of “foodie” culture. Cuisine has always been a personal and ethnic identity marker of course, but in the last twenty or so odd years, what we eat/cook has become a much more powerful and widespread barometer of personal sophistication and merit. A cultural law of undeniable potency, in other words, with chefs serving as high priests of taste, in both senses of that word. No wonder that so many (excellent) cooking shows have emerged on…
Another Week Ends: Philip K. Dick, Pinterest Slogans, Online Rudeness, Tiger Mothers, Bill Fay, Mumford Backlash, Louis CK, and Kramer Grace
1. A breath-taking appreciation of late sci-fi author and savant Philip K. Dick that will make you want to go out and read all the man’s work immediately and/or join the colorfully named ranks of his fans (one guess). Dick’s Christianity even gets a mention, ht CR:
[Author] Jonathan Lethem notes how often, within their flawed and fallen worlds, Dick allowed his characters moments of humane grace. “There are a couple of his books that end with this uncanny expression of sudden, absurd, human connection of love — against the odds of which the entire book may seem to have been stacked.”…
Debilitating Anxiety and The Great American Search for Happiness
A little collaboration with DZ:
The Opinionator‘s Anxiety series continues to impress! Its most recent installment, “America the Anxious” by Ruth Whippman, is a Brit’s perspective on the American fixation on happiness, or at least, happiness-language. As a jumping off point, Whippman talks about the palpable differences between the Facebook feeds of her friends on either side of the Atlantic. While her British friends are often dismissively even-keel about their daily lives, her American friends are perpetually fitting the narrative of their days into the rubric of (capital H) Happiness.
Whippman goes on to frame Happiness as America’s Greatest Commandment, the declarative…
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Another Week Ends: Crimson Despair, Teacher Expectations, MJ’s Bad, Improvement Narratives, Neil Young, Neurospeculation, The Master, and Conf Update
1. An incredibly moving account of “Depression and Despair at Harvard” in response to the suicide of a classmate by Jordan Monge on The Harvard Ichthus. With real vulnerability, Monge touches on the crushing power of expectation, the vicious circle of shame and fear, the grace of defeat, even the toxic and tragic way Christians revert to the Law, post-conversion. It’s a courageous testament to the reality that we are not saved us from pain, but in and through it, ht AZ:
via indexed.com
Admitting my weakness feels like admitting that I am not good enough to bear my own name.…
Where’s the Audience? Narcissism, Affirmation and the Freedom to Wear a Sombrero
A beautiful new installment of The NY Times’ series on Anxiety appeared this past weekend, “On Being Nothing” by Brian Jay Stanley. It’s a personal reflection on a universal reality: our undying need for affirmation from other people. Whether it be praise in the workplace, mail in the inbox, the right hand to hold, fans in the bleachers (or cyberspace), we seem to be hardwired to require, or at least yearn for, external approval. Stanley describes the process of growing up in very sympathetic terms, namely, as the process by which the inborn view of ourselves as the center of…
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Another Week Ends: Incarnational Kerouac, Lutheran Austerity, Dream Identities, Rev, Arrested Development, Mormon Sci Fi, Foodie Piety and Daytrotter
1. Newsweek published an excerpt of D.T. Max’s forthcoming Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace and what an excerpt! It concerns Wallace’s relationship with Mary Karr, and the genus of Infinite Jest. Almost enough to dispel the reservations we voiced earlier this week. It also makes for a great lead-in to another literary find, the blog for The Library of America’ amazing interview with Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell, the editor of the forthcoming Jack Kerouac: Collected Poems. Asked why she thinks Kerouac’s poems still speak to us, she gave the following (jaw-dropping) answer, which gets…
Merciless Momshells and Repentant Paparazzi (Or, Why I Love Jessica Simpson)
“Can a Mom Get a Break?” Janet Min asked in last Sunday’s NY Times. And the answer, of course, is a big N-O! As if the ever-escalating parenting crossfire weren’t enough, Min explores how our cultural Law of Skinny-Sexy has essentially revoked its, um, grace period when it comes to post-pregnancy. It’s a startling expose of the absurd/tragic degree of condemnation that new mothers live under–condemnation which, according to Min, is exacted primarily by other women, with female celebrities serving as the mediators/proxies/scapegoats/atoning sacrifices/etc. The standards here may be absolutely impossible–ridiculously so!–yet that doesn’t seem to have any bearing on…
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Another Week Ends: Monastic (Olympic) Masochism, Successful Children, Justified Paranoia, Mumford and Sons, Edward Gorey, Creedal Colbert and the Return of PZ’s Podcast
1. As the Olympics wind down (and Morrissey gets his London back), we would do well to read Heather Havrilesky’s jaw-droppingly insightful piece “The Loneliness of the Person Watching the Long Distance Runner” that appeared in the NY Times Magazine last week. She absolutely nails the religiosity at the heart of much contemporary athleticism. And she even touches on how we instrumentalize suffering in a distinctly theology-of-glory-like way, i.e. as a means of self-salvation. Which is a bit ironic, since as far as cultural commentators are concerned, I consider Havrilesky a gold-medalist:
If the ’70s and ’80s were marked by a…
Teach Your Children Not-So-Well: When Success Means Failure
A couple of weeks ago on Slate, Allison Benedikt lamented, “Parenting Hate-Reads: When Will They End?”. She recalled a friend of hers who had become so turned off by the ever-escalating online ‘mommy wars’ that it made her not want to have children, period. And Benedikt realized that she couldn’t blame her friend for her hesitancy to wade into such outrageously judgmental waters: on top of the real and perceived exhaustion of bringing up little ones, parents are subjected to the inescapable voice of condemnation and criticism wherever they go on the Interwebs these days. In fact, all this talk…
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Another Week Ends: Scary Nihilists, Repentant Starlets, Priestly Astronauts, Bad Vestments, Passive Aggressive Notes, Recovering Olympicists, Spiritual Conductors, Dylan’s Blood and Rooted
1. The media has been saturated this past week with stories about the Aurora tragedy, and rightfully so. Ross Douthat’s “The Way We Fear Now” was one particulary striking (and slightly scary!) example:
[Holmes'] crime has probably also solidified the Batman movies’ status as a cultural touchstone for our era of anxiety… our contemporary iconography of evil is increasingly dominated by figures who seem to have stepped out of Nolan’s take on the DC Comics universe: world-burners, meticulous madmen, terrorists without a cause.
Older enemies — Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Mao’s China — represented a different form of evil: institutional rather than…
Love Laughs Out Fear: The Quirky Grace of Southwest Airlines
I’m generally a nervous flyer. It’s gotten better in the last couple years, but I still get sweaty-palmed and tightfisted when the plane is ducking and bobbing through even the most minor bits of turbulence. When the pilot’s ding sounds, I always mute my music to listen in. I’m quick to buckle-up. I’m quick to assign my own seat if I can–I always pick a window. I don’t know why that matters, as if knowing exactly where I’m going to be sitting in a nosediving 757 is some hellbent way to have some control in certain death. I guess I’d…
Books / Comics / Education / Film / Humor / Identity / Law / News / Relationships / Religion / Suffering / Theology / TV / Week In Review
Another Week Ends: Delta Malaise, Self-Deprecating Obituaries, The Hill and Wood, Breaking Bad, Bound Atheists, Fall Conf Schedule and more Dark Knight Rises
1. First up, The New York Times published an eye-opening article about sorority rush in US colleges this week that’s been spreading like wildfire. It visits all the usual themes of the Law of group belonging: self-doubt, attempts at identity improvement, the need to belong, and our single-minded attempts to live up to a certain standard – no matter how much or little positive correlation it has with Old Testament/church morality. To illustrate how far the phenomenon of belonging is going:
In the early rounds, [girls] have only minutes to make a positive impression… Many aspiring sisters spend their summer working…
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Another Week Ends: Trickle-Down Distress, Klout Scores, Playful Parenting, Glorious Ruin, Churchy Beer, Moonrise, Darnielle on Amy Grant, Blur and Louis CK
1. “Trickle-Down Distress: How America’s Broken Meritocracy Drives Our National Anxiety Epidemic” – what a title! Maura Kelly’s piece in The Atlantic functions almost as a survey of a number of the studies and articles we’ve highlighted in recent months, such the WHO reports that show America leading the world in clinical anxiety by a significant margin, and the recent piece about Having It All. In what essentially amounts to a treatise on the cruelty (and practical and psychological dead-end) of works righteousness, Kelly looks at how thorough-going the conflation of personal identity with material/career success has become in our…
Charles: "full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction" ...
Paul Walker: Amazing post! Thank you....
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